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February 22nd, 2016 
Awake Goy 
Print FriendlyAbove photo: SchulteProductions / Thinkstock
On paper, federal law in the United States requires all employers to ensure their employees are paid the minimum wage — $7.25 an hour, as guaranteed by the Fair Labor Standards Act. Service workers are legally supposed to earn this amount, whether via direct wages (the federal tipped minimum wage is $2.13 an hour) or a combination of wages and tips. Simple enough, right? In practice, however, this system is ripe for employee exploitation, as a recent U.S. Department of Labor probe in Michigan shows.
The owners of Sophia’s Pancake House, a diner with locations in Kalamazoo and Benton Harbor, Mich., were discovered to have actually required waitstaff to pay $2 per hour from their tips merely to remain employed.
And if that weren’t audacious enough, workers were routinely not paid for working overtime, forced to pay for wrong orders and even left with unpaid hours altogether. This often meant workers were earning less than the federal minimum wage. The Department of Labor’s findings came with a ruling against owners John and Peter Philis requiring $245,000 be paid to 118 employees for back wages and damages.
As unbelievable as this type of blatant exploitation may seem, it is hardly a rare situation.
The U.S. Department of Labor, in a lawsuit filed last year, claims the owner of 17 New Jersey Houlihan’s restaurant locations, A.C.E. Restaurant Group, has been skimming workers’ tips. Between February 2014 and May 2014, the suit alleges, over $40,000 in tips were illegally withheld. Unsurprisingly, workers at these restaurants also had unpaid overtime and were routinely docked pay for meals that had been already paid for, according to the suit.
A similar lawsuit, leveled against the owners of an upscale restaurant in Vero Beach, Fla., claims that 14 percent of all tips were consistently collected; four percent to pay for credit card processing costs and the rest to cover the manager’s salary. This, all while the Maison Martinique’s owners were grossing over $500,000 in annual revenue. The lawsuit seeks to recoup these stolen tips from 2011 to 2014.
The audacity doesn’t stop: In yet another lawsuit, this time in South Carolina, the owner of Charleston Bagel Co. is being accused of keeping a large portion of workers’ tips for herself. Jolanda Mazzocchi, the suit claims, would collect all tips herself and once a month pay a portion of that out to her employees. However, that applied only to cash tips — she kept all credit card tips for herself.
Lehigh Valley Restaurant Group Inc., the owner of 21 Red Robin restaurant franchises in Pennsylvania, might just take the cake. According to a lawsuit filed by two servers, the restaurants’ owners were actually taking money from waitstaff in order to pay food preparation workers (like kitchen staff) enough to meet minimum wage requirements. As federal law states, this is illegal — the tipped minimum wage and tip pools cannot apply to workers who aren’t among the waitstaff. A settlement of $1.3 million was reached in December.
A book could be filled with the seemingly endless examples of outright food service worker exploitation. Why is this the case? Chiefly, it is due to the fact that these types of employees are subjected to a tipped minimum wage rather than, as virtually every other wage workers in the United States are, a flat federal minimum wage.
The tipped minimum wage relies too heavily on employers to dispense tips fairly — because, who’s to call them out on it? As this small sample shows, accountability via court only comes when workers realize they are being exploited. Even then, as is the case in many of these lawsuits, no action was taken until after the worker was fired or left. As one attorney representing a former service worker put it: “They know they’re being cheated, but they’d rather have a job and be cheated than not have a job.”
Does this mean you shouldn’t tip when you go out? Of course not. But if you are concerned about where your tip is going, go ahead and tip, then inquire of your waitstaff about whether it will go to them. If they say no or are unsure, politely suggest they Google the “Fair Labor Standards Act.” In 2016 no hardworking individual in the United States should be subjected to exploitation.
Source Article from https://www.popularresistance.org/service-workers-had-to-pay-to-stay-employed/
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